Friday, January 23. 2015

All the author opinions cited by U. Utah librarian Rick Anderson in his recent UKSG squib are familiar ones, based largely on author ignorance. Their rebuttals have been known for years (e.g., the self-archiving FAQ since 2001 and even earlier in the AmSci OA Forum). Most are covered in this:

The very same prima facie author objections would no doubt have been voiced if authors had been polled in advance on the (universal) mandate to publish or perish.

Although it’s unclear what his underlying motivation is, Utah librarian Rick Anderson has consistently sounded like a publisher’s advocate (or subscription agent!) for years and years now, and in his UKSG squib he is simply citing the persistence of author ignorance and the status quo as evidence and justification for the persistence of author ignorance and the status quo!

The remedy, of course, is effective global Green OA mandates.

Green OA and Green OA mandates grow anarchically, article by article and institution/funder by institution/funder, rather than journal by journal. So journals can only be cancelled once all or almost all of their contents are accessible via Green OA — and that day arrives only when Green OA and effective Green OA mandates have become global and are generating full or almost full compliance.

Wednesday, January 14. 2015

1. The US government denies entry to high Hungarian officials, including the head of the Hungarian IRS, a personal friend of the prime minister, Viktor Orban, for corruption (e.g., what amounts to demanding bribes from US companies for doing business in Hungary).

2. Orban (who calls all the shots in what he calls his “illiberal state”), instead of honestly and transparently investigating the corruption charges, demands that the US goverrnment do the investigation and provide the evidence, accuses the US of trying to manipulate Hungary for US purposes, and publicly orders the head of the Hungarian IRS to either sue the American embassy chargeé d’affaires (the US messenger) for defamation or be fired from her job.

3. And now Orban extends an “olive branch”: “Let’s let bygones be bygones. Forget these corruption charges. Back to business as usual.”

There is something profoundly rotten going on in Hungary these days. Media control and other shenanigans have so far prevented the electorate from smelling it, for two terms, but by now the stench is becoming overwhelming internationally, and it’s even beginning to get through to the noses of the Hungarian citizenry, who have been demonstrating nonviolently in growing numbers for Orban’s ouster.

Orban, with his US “olive branch” in one hand, has publicly floated threats to amend the lawshttp://openaccess.eprints.org/ of public assembly to put an end to this public unrest as part of a “national defence plan” to protect Hungary from the foreign forces fomenting these expressions of dissatisfaction from his unruly citizenry for their sinister, anti-Hungarian purposes...

Tuesday, January 13. 2015

Today's transitional period for peer-reviewed journal publishing -- when both the price of subscribing to conventional journals and the price of publishing in open-access journals ("Gold OA") is grossly inflated by obsolete costs and services -- is hardly the time to inflate costs still further by paying peer reviewers.

Institutions and funders need to mandate the open-access self-archiving of all published articles first ("Green OA"). This will make subscriptions unsustainable, forcing journals to downsize to providing only peer review, leaving access-provision and archiving to the distributed global network of institutional repositories. The price per submitted paper of managing peer review -- since peers review, and always reviewed for free -- is low, fair, affordable and sustainable, on a no-fault basis (irrespective of whether the paper is accepted or rejected: accepted authors should not have to subsidize the cost of rejected papers).

Let's get there first, before contemplating whether we really want to raise that cost yet again, this time by paying peers.

The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.

The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)